1. Field
The invention is in the field of tire shredding apparatus and is concerned primarily with structure for feeding the tires into the cutting portion of the apparatus.
2. State of the Art
Machines for shredding tires are commercially available. One of the first is patterned after the waste shredding machine disclosed in my now expired U.S. Pat. No. 3,578,252 of May 11, 1971, in which several series of mutually spaced cutter blades project from the circumferences of respective counter-rotating shafts for shearing travel in corresponding spaces between a series of stationary cutter bars. The cutter blades serve, in effect, as scissor blades cooperating with reciprocal scissor blade edges of the stationary cutter bars that perform as anvils against which waste materials, such as tough and hard-to-cut rubber tires, are held by the inherent action of the machine as the cutter blades bear down upon them.
Various ways of feeding tires to such machines, other than the hopper shown by my aforesaid patent, have been devised, as shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,061,277; 4,119,277; and 4,374,573. My U.S. Pat. No. 4,205,799 of June 3, 1980, among other improvements in the machine, discloses how feed into the shredding assembly of individual tires successively discharged downwardly from an endless conveyor is facilitated by arranging the cutter blades and the cutter bars at downwardly and outwardly inclined angles with respect to the rotary shaft on which the cutter blades are mounted, so that such blades act to pull the fed material into the shredding assembly.
However, with all of these feeding arrangements, tire shredding has been confronted by continuing difficulty in regulating the feed to prevent machine stoppages due to improper presentation of successive tires to the shredding mechanism.
Accordingly, it was a principal object in the making of the present invention to devise tire-feeding structure that would insure effective cutting presentation of successive tires to the tire shredding mechanism of apparatus of the type concerned so that work stoppages would be reduced to a minimum if not entirely eliminated. Another object was to provide a feeding arrangement that would effectively accommodate tires considerably different one from another in size.